Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

If you’ve been reading Backwoods Home magazine and blogs for a while, you’ve seen me and others point out the incontrovertible fact that so-called “gun control” in our country stemmed largely from whites wanting to disarm blacks in the post-Civil War years.

The man who wants to be the lead advocate of citizen disarmament, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, has apparently come out of the closet in the last few days with his take on the subject, posted here and quoted below:

Moderator Jennifer Bradley, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Institute, then asked what the U.S. can do to get people out of poverty. Bloomberg responded that conventional wisdom points to education, but education isn’t going to help uneducated adults. Bradley later asked how government can offer basic fairness to the children “who have been failed.”

Bloomberg claimed that 95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25. Cities need to get guns out of this group’s hands and keep them alive, he said.

“These kids think they’re going to get killed anyway because all their friends are getting killed,” Bloomberg said. “They just don’t have any long-term focus or anything. It’s a joke to have a gun. It’s a joke to pull a trigger.”

Note that the Aspen publication where it first appeared buried it amidst a story on Bloomberg’s diatribe against legalization of marijuana. Let’s see how long it takes the mainstream media to publicize Mr. Bloomberg’s profile of certain groups who, he thinks, should be preemptively stripped of their rights. (Hmmm…teens into mid-twenties? Doesn’t that cover a helluva lot of young black American men who’ve fought and died for their country?) It’ll be interesting to hear Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Eric Holder comment on this, too…

With a new, Obama-appointed Surgeon General with a long history of anti-gun advocacy, we now see a resurgence of the Prohibitionists’ efforts to have firearms ownership be excoriated as a health and safety risk to Americans.

Sigh…

When I opened my first shooting school to teach armed citizens the use of deadly force in 1981, I very quickly noticed something my predecessors in the private firearms academy business, Jeff Cooper and Ray Chapman and John Farnam, had already seen: in more classes than not, health care professionals were the single most highly represented occupational category among the students. That trend has continued to this day.

It seems counterintuitive to those who don’t understand the real-world dynamics of not only guns, but self-defense. All that’s required to understand it is common sense. Doctors and nurses and paramedics and rehabilitation therapists aren’t like ordinary citizens, who see violence mentioned in their morning paper or on TV, mutter “Tsk, tsk,” and turn the page or the channel. These medical professionals see the results of violent criminal assault upon the innocent, and some of them see it daily!

Because they deal with life and death (or life-threatening illness and trauma) on such a regular basis, doctors and other health-care providers become realists and pragmatists. And when you analyze survival of violent crime realistically and pragmatically, seeing its victims so often, it is logical to very soon come to a realistic and pragmatic conclusion: Not me! Not mine!

I hate it when newspapers get hold of concealed carry permit lists and publish them, but one good thing has come from that: every single time it happens, you see a disproportionate number of the gun carriers are medical people (and lawyers, and judges). The people who deal with reality day in, and day out. There is something to be learned from that.

A great resource is Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, at http://www.drgo.us/. Read the recent article by Dr. John Edeen, a Texas MD who compares two homicides which occurred in medical environments, both perpetrators having opened fire with the intent of murdering medical professionals. One was ended by a doc who had his own gun…the other was not. Dr. Edeen’s article speaks for itself. I know Dr. Edeen, and have spoken on a panel with him speaking against the fallacious “gun-free zone” concept, along with gunfight researcher Chris Bird, at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in 2014, available here.

The founder and head of DRGO is my old friend Dr. Tim Wheeler. He, like the large membership for whom he speaks, is a voice of reality.

It’s no secret that Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown” crusade against gun ownership has been known to bend the truth. Remember when they listed the slain Boston Marathon Bomber as a “victim of gun violence”?

Now comes more mendacity. Apparently, in a blurb railing against transfer of firearms by other than licensed dealers, they pirated watermarked pictures from a legitimate dealer in Vermont, who makes sure that all his sales go through FFL licensees with NICS checks. Kudos to guns.com for breaking the story.

Rachel Baird appears to be the gun shop’s lawyer of record on this matter, and it looks as if Attorney Mitchell Lake, one of her associates, is also on the case on behalf of Crossfire Arms. Though I’ve only spoken with Ms. Baird on the phone, she seems passionately interested in getting justice for the gun shop owner. I’ve met Mr. Lake in person. Like any good lawyer, he knows the rules of the Court inside and out…but, more important, he knows the issues in this case inside and out, and as a staunch advocate of Second Amendment Rights, he will demonstrate the very definition of “zealous advocacy.” Mr. Bloomberg, of course, can afford to field whole covens of lawyers…but none of them will be able to change the truth.

The recent atrocity in Paris reminds us all of the continuing danger from homicidal fanatics. The cowardly murderers ran rampant, unopposed; according to some reports, one or both of the police officers killed in the massacre were unarmed and helpless to fight back.

President Obama is taking a lot of heat for not flying to Paris to join a reported 40 other heads of state in a show of solidarity. This is one thing I won’t criticize the man for. If I were head of Secret Service I would have stood in the Oval Office and screamed at him, “It’s nucking futs! Can you imagine a more irresistible target for Islamic terrorists than forty-one of you, including the head of the Great Satan itself?!?” I’m frankly amazed that there wasn’t an attack on the gathering, though I’m glad there wasn’t…and if the free world’s security services are smart, they won’t tell us if there was such a conspiracy and they were able to successfully abort it behind the scenes.

The prohibitionists and anti-self-defense groups will scoff at the idea that one or more people with handguns among the crop of victims might have thwarted two men who wielded AK47s. They don’t want to hear about Charl van Wyk, who stopped twice that many in a South African attack, armed only with his five-shot snub-nose .38 revolver. You can read about his case and more – and about dozens of helpless victims murdered when there wasn’t “a good guy (or gal) with a gun” to stand up for them – in the current issue of American Handgunner magazine: http://americanhandgunner.com/the-false-hope-of-gun-free-zones/ .

The authorities expect more such attacks throughout the free world and, yes, here. My advice is load, holster, and be ready.

It’s not about the odds…it’s about the stakes.

That’s enough about what I think. I want to hear what YOU think about this.

Last year, a man ran amok in a mental health facility in Pennsylvania. He murdered one victim and wounded a doctor before the doc drew his own small caliber pistol and shot the guy, stopping what might well have been a mass murder. The doc was not in compliance with the gun-free zone policy of the clinic. After the police pointed out how many lives he had saved, that problem sort of went away…

John Gavazzi runs an excellent podcast for ethicists and psychologists, called – appropriately enough – Ethics and Psychology.

I appeared on there recently when the topic in the first paragraph above was on the menu. As a subject matter expert on deadly force, I was the only one on the podcast panel who was not a psychologist. Yes, you could say I was…shrink-wrapped. The podcast linked above runs about an hour.

I thought the topic was covered well; if you have an hour to spare, you can find it here:

I was one of three speakers who addressed the gun-free zone issue last September at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Chicago, hosted by Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and the Second Amendment foundation. If you have 40-45 minutes, those presentations can be found here: